'Red' paints portrait of intense egotism

The first line of “Red” – “What do you see?,” which is also its last line – serves as a key to our understanding of abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko.

Seeing is perceiving, and John Logan’s play is all about perceiving: How Rothko perceives himself and others, how he perceives their perception of him and of his art, and how Rothko sees his own art and that of others.

The 2009 drama, characterized as a one-act for its unbroken stream of scenes unfolding over a two-year period, has just two roles: Rothko and a fictional assistant named Ken.

At International City Theatre, caryn desai fills our field of vision with Rothko, his grandiose ideas and his cocooning himself in his New York City studio in 1958 and ’59.

Director and producer desai and company give Tony Abatemarco everything he needs to create a tour-de-force performance as the lofty, self-aggrandizing Rothko. Abatemarco doesn’t just look like the artist looked in his late fifties; he seizes, in an aggressive, Rothko-like way, the showcase role, filling it out from center to edges.

Rothko treats his new assistant Ken (Patrick Stafford), an eager, would-be artist, as a subservient, but truth is, he loves having a captive audience for his pronouncements about the nature and function of art, his boasts about his life and accomplishments and his denigration of his peers and of past masters.

Of course, Ken acts as our surrogate, because everything Rothko has to say is for our benefit. Logan, who wrote the screenplays for the 2004 film “The Aviator” and 2000’s “Gladiator,” has penned a symphony of words, concepts and ideas – a text as deep as Rothko would have liked, and one his brilliance deserves.

The play’s key human dynamic is the Rothko-Ken relationship. At first timid, tentative and deferential, Ken, over two years of interacting with Rothko, begins to stand up to the older man, challenging his assertions while trying to make him see that he has sold out in taking a huge commission to provide the artwork for the chic new restaurant The Four Seasons.

Logan’s text bears marked similarities to “Master Class,” of which ICT staged a fine production earlier this year. Rothko is just as belittling of Ken as is Maria Callas with her various students. The difference is that Ken works for Rothko, and isn’t regarded as a pupil, so he is subjected to his pejoratives on a daily basis.

Rothko’s relationship with Ken, he announces, will be one-sided: Rothko can say and demand anything he likes but Ken isn’t allowed the privilege to respond. He abhors Ken’s “neediness,” yet can’t resist spewing out his ideas about art, and everything connected to it.

Rothko, though, hates having his statements questioned or challenged, something Ken does with increasing frequency the longer he’s around the artist.

As Rothko, Abatemarco is tiger-like, prowling ICT’s stage, growling at Ken and to himself. He paints Rothko as a temperamental, finicky, condescending bully. Throughout “Red,” the actor’s Rothko is a bloviating blowhard – brilliant, yes, but full of himself, often to the point of self-delusion.

Delicate in looks and persona, Stafford’s clean-cut Ken can stand only so much guff from Rothko before he begins to resist being dominated, ultimately exploding in a Rothko-like rant condemning the artist’s self-importance and “titanic self-absorption.”

The play’s title certainly isn’t arbitrary. To Rothko, red represents life and black, the void that surrounds us both in life and in death. Early on, Rothko and Ken rattle off a stunning list of objects that are red and which capture “the emotion, the feeling, of red – not the color” – a total and profound immersion into the concept of “red.”

“Red” the play also foreshadows Rothko’s 1970 suicide: Ken arrives for work one day in late 1959 and finds him on the floor of his studio, unconscious, his wrists soaked in red. In performance art fashion, the artist has created a symbolic wrist-slashing, with paint standing in for blood.

JR Bruce’s set of Rothko’s studio is defined by its tall windows set very high up, a feature that creates the feeling of a chapel – an apt visual metaphor in Rothko’s self-image as a high priest of art. By contrast, the cluttered work benches and a stack of huge canvases lend the needed realism.

The hallmark of Donna Ruzika’s lighting design is that it mimics the low levels Ken says Rothko relies upon for his paintings to generate the “illusion” the artist desires.

Sound designer Dave Mickey and desai feature some of the world’s greatest classical works via the records Rothko plays while creating new canvases – expansive, timeless music that reflects the kind of emotions and concepts Rothko spent a lifetime trying to express.